Once More With Feeling
by Veronique Sarisandeul
Summary: It's not like they were ecstatic about their happy ending, but they were perfectly content, and really didn't need a second chance at life. No, seriously, they were fine. A Kakashi-and-Tenzou time travel fic, because there aren't any.
Tenzou blinked his eyes open, only to be greeted by the wavery sight of a little girl in a tank, as viewed through thick liquid and two layers of glass. _Wow,_ he thought, _I haven't had this dream in a while_.

/~~*~~\

When he came out of his shock, Kakashi began planning. That was, after all, what he did. Plunging in without a plan and somehow coming out on top, with new allies and, miraculously, no more survival instinct than before was for Naruto; _some_ people need a strategy. Kakashi had always been one for rigid control over everything in his life, as much as his students probably wouldn't believe that.

His first thought, as ever, is of Obito. He has built his life around that boy. He will save his life if it kills him. Which it might; there is no telling how a difference in action will cascade events. But if it keeps Obito alive – _sane, here_ – he will gladly accept the consequences.

His second is of Rin and the Sanbi, and then of Sensei and his wife and Naruto, growing up alone. Sasuke, lost and bitter. Sakura, ignored and abandoned; his complete and utter failure as a sensei.

But beyond personal concerns, beyond personal regrets, there is the village. He has sworn to uphold the wellbeing of the village; he has eaten, bathed, and breathed duty for as long as he can remember. He _must_ eliminate threats that have not yet come to light, that only he yet knows of. Root. Danzo. Orochimaru. A smattering of other traitors, other tragedies. Security holes that would not be closed up until sometime in the future, which he only knows of because he was an ANBU at the time.

ANBU. Danzo, Orochimaru, Root – fuck. _Tenzou_. He's ten, or thereabouts – nine, eleven? Tenzou is four years younger than him, and was about six when Danzo took him out of that abandoned lab and turned him into an emotionless tool; a broken child. Tenzou had grown so much after escaping Root; had become, sometime when Kakashi wasn't looking, a better man than he. Steady and solid and strong, but isolated. Undeniably fond of people but as wary of them as Kakashi himself. Who could he have been if life had been kinder to him? Who could he have been if Danzo and that fucking cursed seal hadn't left a menacing shadow over everything in his life?

For every time he had left him behind, manipulated and let him down, Kakashi owed it to him to find out.

With a deep breath, Kakashi picked himself up from the forest floor, where his younger self had clearly been training, and set out. He had a lab to find.

/~~*~~\

Tenzou takes a deep breath (sort of. Breathing is a little weird, in the tank.) and reaches for the mokuton that lives in his skin. He pushes it outward, beyond his fragile child's body, strong and solid and everything he needs but can't find in himself – and glass shatters and the ground above heaves, metal of the ceiling shrieking in protest as a tree spirals up from an abandoned laboratory, pushing out into the sun.

/~~*~~\

Kakashi finds Tenzou by sheer luck. He has only the vaguest notion of where the lab is, and later he will acknowledge that the panic he had been trying desperately to suppress was influencing his actions. In the meantime, it's a little hard to miss the enormous surge of Tenzou's chakra – or the huge tree which has spiraled up from the ground not a meter from his face.

A small figure scrambles gracelessly down the trunk, and wobbles on landing for a bare moment before collapsing. Kakashi darts forward, alarmed, and catches what is clearly a very (very!) small Tenzou. He barely has time to be grossed out at the whatever-it-is he's coated with (like very thin jello, and he _really_ wants to wash his hands now) before Tenzou begins struggling wildly and he's forced to drop him after all.

He stares up at him with wide eyes, which are even more dramatic on his tiny face. He looks entirely freaked out, and all Kakashi can think is _damn, Tenzou was an adorable kid_.

/~~*~~\

Tenzou did not expect the tree. Tenzou did not expect Kakashi. Taking into account the previous surprises, however, he _did_ expect the ANBU.


End file.
